Good morning Halong Bay

I’m on the boat of Halong party cruise,and it’s a beautiful morning, and I’ve chosen this morningto come down here in large part because this morningwe have low tide at sunrise.It’s just after sunrise, the sun has come upand we’re starting to get some lighton the lighthouse, and what I’m going for herebecause of the low tide, I’m able to get down lower,so that I don’t have to be in the waterto get the angle that I’m looking for.And that allows me also to have a bit more of the rockand the foreground, the rocky coast hereand the foreground below the lighthouse.

This lighthouse is up on a precipice,and so I’m able to get down a bit lowerbecause the tide is low, and I can kind of choose my anglevery carefully moving among the rocks,some of which are very slippery, of course.And now I can set up my exposure.We’re starting to get a little bit more light,just a little bit of light is starting to strikethe lighthouse itself, and so I’m going to waitfor the sun to get a little bit higher,but in the meantime I can get things set up.I’m using an aperture of F4, and I’m shooting pretty widebecause I want to include a lot of the foreground rockin my shot, and so right now I’m shooting at about18 millimeter focal length, and my aperture is set to F8because I’m just trying to get adequate sharpness,trying to essentially get the sharpest result possible.

I’m not worried about depth of field.For one thing, I don’t have a whole lot of depthto contend with, I’m also shooting very wide,I’m focusing at a reasonable distanceand so I’m going to have a pretty good amountof depth of field, almost regardlessof what setting I use on that lens for the aperture.And at the moment, with the light that we havemy base exposure at 100 ISO, at an aperture of F8,is a shutter speed of 190th of a second.And that’s working pretty well.The only issue is that while I’m retaining all the highlightdetail, even with the sun striking the topof the lighthouse here, I still havea lot of dark shadow areas in the foreground.

So I’m actually going to capture an HDR.Quite frankly, I don’t think I really want an HDR shotin this particular situation, I really just want a straightphotographic image, so to speak,but I want to give myself that option later,depending on the level of detail.And so I’m going to set up my auto-exposure bracketing.I’m just going to separate by two stops,capture three images.The darkest exposure will be essentially my baseline,what I think of as my normal shot,and then I’ll just capture a couple of additional imagesone at plus two stops, one at plus four stops,to really maximize the amount of shadow detailthat I’m picking up in the foreground.

And so in this case to activate that,I’ve got the two stop separationwith my darkest exposure set to F8at a 90th of a second, and I’m using the two-second timerin order to make sure that I’m automatically capturingthe bracketed exposure there with this particular camera.And so I’ll go ahead and configure that.Everything’s all set, so I’ll capture a test shot here.(shutter clicks)And there are my three exposures for the HDR,and in the darkest exposure we have a good exposure.

In other words, we have all of the information.I’m not clipping any of the highlights,it’s just the shadows that are very darkand a minor degree of clipping in those shadows.Not too much, probably not anythingthat I need to worry about, but again,I’d like to give myself some options.With the shot at plus two stopsI’ve got a good amount of shadow detailand at plus four stops of courseI have tremendous shadow detail,even in the little nooks and crannies of these rocks.And so, fortunately, being able to get downa little bit lower to the water, I might even venture downa little further from here, getting a more interestingangle from the light, essentially getting a shotthat’s almost as though I were on the waterphotographing the lighthouse,except with a more interesting perspectivebecause I’m able to get these rocks in the foreground.

Tomorrow there’ll be a high tide at this hour,so today’s the day to get this shot.Having done that research, found out when low tide was,when sunrise is, getting out here early,and getting everything set up,I think I’ll come away with some cool photos, I hope.